Mad as hell

Everyone wants a piece of Rebecca Traister right now. Why? Because we’re fucking pissed off (and, yes, I was inspired by her book’s passage on the healthy effects of cursing).

On Oct. 6, the U.S. Senate voted to confirm to the highest court of the land Judge Brett Kavanaugh — an accused perpetrator of sexual assault, likely committer of perjury, definite partisan and — as demonstrated at the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing — an entitled, petulant former prep school/frat boy bully. Did I mention that multitudes of survivors of sexual assault felt triggered while watching credible testimony from an admittedly “terrified” Christine Blasey Ford. Don’t get me started. Or do get me started, because according to Traister, the author of Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women’s Anger, our fury is what’s going to help us dismantle this mess. The book is a searing and comprehensive analysis of the history and power of women’s rage, from ancient history to the current #metoo moment. Traister, who writes for New York magazine, is on a book tour with Good and Mad, and we spoke while she was on a train outside Philadelphia, heading for Washington, D.C. She’ll be here on Oct. 13 as part of the Wisconsin Book Festival — a prescient booking if ever there was one.

You’ve written an extraordinary book. What surprised you most when delving into the historical and contemporary expressions of women’s anger?

I guess that my biggest surprise is how much it turns out I have to say about this — how much that is in my brain that I never thought about being organized around anger.

Why did you choose anger as the organizing theme?

What I was seeing was a willingness to express fury and dissent about the way power has accumulated in this country. That is what I saw with the health care protests, the resistance to the travel ban, teacher strike, gun control, and Black Lives Matter and Occupy. We have been building the insistence that we take the charges like the ones against Bill O’Reilly and Cosby seriously. I felt that the work of these activists and protesters might be changing us. And so this is an iteration, the next chapter in a story I’m trying to tell.

Another chapter is unfolding right now. What were your impressions from Dr. Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee?

There was this tremendous contrast between the range of emotion that was available to the nominee and Christine Blasey Ford because we know she couldn’t rage. She would not have been taken seriously. The press would have suggested she was “unhinged” or too emotional or addled by anger. Women’s anger is considered irrational. But anger from men is heard as bolstering their righteousness.

What do you make of the viral scene with the two assault survivors, Maria Gallagher and Ana Maria Archila, who corralled Sen. Jeff Flake and his staff in the elevator? “When he would not look at me, or the woman standing next to me baring her soul, I felt only fury,” Gallagher wrote in The New York Times.

Outside the courtroom there is this mass protest, even before the hearing. Two of those women get into that elevator and what they do was so powerful. [Gallagher] was willing to demand that a powerful man meet her eye. To say to a powerful man, “You have to face my anger.”

You pay a lot of attention to the multiracial history of women’s expressions of anger. What is the role of intersectionality in the movement going forward?

We are in the midst of doing necessary work, the continuation of dismantling racial and economic hierarchy in the women’s movement. Some of the anger that I’m writing about in this book is anger between women. Every mass social movement, and certainly the New Left, has been riven by inequities: racial, gender, homophobia. There is a drive to make sure to air that anger, which I think is necessary to correct many of the errors of the past.

What role does anger play in today’s politics? And where do you see it leading?

It connects women who are angry about the same things to each other, and opens the door to collaboration and affiliation — it’s crucial to whatever happens next. If we look at our history we’ll see this mass anger has been the stuff of transformational social movements. I wouldn’t presume to predict the results. It depends on how much people continue to engage. Everybody comes from different angles, different furies — whether they are holding protest signs, telling their stories of sexual assault, fundraising, running for office, striking for better wages or protesting sexual harassment at McDonalds.There are all these different entry points, but we are actually going to have to change the white patriarchal system and break it apart. We are going to change the rules of behavior and how we permit powerful men to behave.

But we are definitely experiencing a backlash: Trump saying it’s a hard time for young men, Bannon saying women will destroy us.

I suspect that we are about to enter a period in which the most powerful institutions are going to have the power to use legal mechanisms to suppress the power of outrage, to suppress voting, to increase the power of corporations, to suppress the right to collectively bargain, to suppress the choices we make over our bodies. This is a real battle. I’m not sitting here saying everything is great because we’re mad. We are talking about the rest of our lives and the rest of our children’s lives. We are talking about things that have been going on for centuries. We have to acknowledge that we’re in it and it’s hard and there’s going to be a lot of loss.

Rebecca Traister, author of Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women’s Anger appears at the Wisconsin Book Festival on Oct. 13, at the Central Library, 6 p.m. At 9 p.m. she’ll participate in an event called Bookmarks, moderated by To the Best of Our Knowledge host Anne Strainchamps. See wisconsinbookfestival.org for details.